The operator case studies were particularly interesting, as they explained real-life activities, results, and business cases being explored worldwide.  These types of presentations are always valuable because they allow the audience to really keep a finger on the pulse of the industry.  There were enough case studies to confidently reveal some trends:

• Service providers worldwide are experimenting with high-value services that reflect modern subscriber usage characteristics
• Operators are following a path towards subscriber empowerment and complete information transparency, like services where subscribers choose which traffic is most important (this information is then incorporated into personalized congestion management solutions) and have access to granular and up-to-date usage information
• Interoperability, ease of deployment, and consistency of information are powerful factors when network providers are choosing vendors
• Demonstrably proving and quantifying the quality of experience from the subscriber perspective continues to be a challenge

I spoke on Wednesday afternoon in a slot concisely named “Monetising real-time and video services through Network Policy Control and business intelligence analytics.”  However, not one to let a title get in the way of a good presentation, I chose to slightly reinterpret the word “video” to mean “Social Media”.  (I caught a bit of a grimace from the moderator Graham Finnie, Chief Analyst of Heavy Reading, but he knows I’m a loose cannon by now anyway and even foreshadowed the potential for surprise when introducing my slot.)

My reasoning for changing on-the-fly was simple: I believe it’s better to have a real social media case study than to explore hypothetical scenarios in a spreadsheet.  My thinking is that you need real data to make decisions, so your major investments are based on facts rather than assumptions, on quantifiable evidence rather than gut feelings, and so on.  I presented a case study in which a customer of ours introduced a fixed-price social media bolt-on that has experienced tremendous success (market validation that the end consumers agree with the value proposition).

The conference wasn’t completely presentation-based, however. For example, Sandvine hosted an interactive workshop on “Business Intelligence Analytics & Network Policy Control”.  Keeping with the case-study theme, we presented three business cases that we backed up with real data from our business intelligence solutions:

• Mobile Video Optimization
• Usage Plan Analysis 
• Mobile Packet Core Offload

If the level of interactivity and participation is an accurate indication, these three cases all struck chords with the service providers and solutions integrators in the audience.  All three had an equally positive reception from the crowd, with most network operators zooming in on any two of the three.

Some of the ideas discussed at this conference are already appearing in the marketplace, while others won’t be seen for a few years; nevertheless, the future seems bright not only for players in this space, but also for the ultimate beneficiaries of all the innovation: Internet users.